Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what assessment he has made of regional variations in participation in the National Citizen Service.

Successive independent evaluations have shown that National Citizen Service has seen significant growth in participation across England and Northern Ireland, with the programme seeing its 100,000th participant this year. The programme is delivered by regional providers who are performance managed by the NCS Trust, an independent not-for-profit organisation. Regional performance is regularly monitored, along with other factors including quality of NCS delivery and the social mix of participants.

An independent evaluation of NCS will be published by Cabinet Office in 2015, after the conclusion of the 2014 NCS programmes, and will detail the costs and number of young participants during 2014.